The CX Blog

The ASP report on Ten Best Web Support sites of 2009 is due to ship in August; you can order yours now–HERE. The report will give in depth information on what the judges found that worked, didn’t work, and what the companies might do in the future for even better returns. The 2009 winners are:

OPEN DIVISION

This report will be a powerful collection of good information and real stories of how these companies “did it.” The best thing about this report is it will help you avoid costly mistakes and make use of lessons learned:

Moreover, these sites truly define “best practices” in Web support. They’ve been chosen by a rigorous review process that looks at 25 different performance metrics, including usability, design, knowledgebase implementation, interactive features, use of technology, customer experience, overall strategy, and much more.

My e-colleague nkilkenny at Design for Learning has a very nice post (Using Wikis to Teach Writing) worth taking a few minutes to read. Her understanding of how to get newbies into a wiki and using it is fabulous and helpful. Basicially she lays out an exercise where they are allowed to access, edit, collective view, and collaborate on a written piece together–simple, elegant, effective.

This approach can be used for any group, any age–9th grade to the exec level at a corp. In order for execs to buy into the idea of using wikis–which for many have a slightly scary, techie reputation and the name, wiki, what’s up with that? –they need to access the concept of a wiki first and Natalie’s approach is so simple to set up and get working, anyone can access it.

Very helpful, thanks! Anyone else have approaches to teaching a concept such as use of a wiki?

One clear aspect of Amazon’s success is its holistic understanding of the customer experience.  What goes on “behind the curtain” shouldn’t be seen or felt by the customer, because all the customer is really interested in is the experience of the store or service.

Jeff Bezos said at the investor’s meeting recently:

“If you identify the key drivers of customer experience - those key needs - they are unlikely to change over a 10-year period. So if you base strategy on things that are permanent in time, very durable things, all the energy you put into those things continues to pay you dividends years into the future.” He identified those key drivers as low prices; vast selection; and extreme convenience - especially fast, reliable delivery.”

Those things sound pretty straight-forward, pretty much the farthest thing from Rocket Science, yet they’re very difficult to do.  Just think of the million moving parts from the website product listing, to the online ordering process, to the internal order processing, to the communications, the picking/packing/shipping, the online order status….on and on.  Getting that box to your door when it is supposed to be there ends up seeming like magic, once you take all those things into consideration.

But the Amazon focus on customer experience doesn’t want it to seem as much like magic as like steady-as-she-goes normal, repeatable, expected, predictable, brandable.  And that’s brilliant.

I added my own experience with Clearwire to this write up of the growing list of poster-kids for companies using twitter as a service channel.
It’s an excellent channel that has an immediate and profound brand impact: it’s direct, it’s transparent, it’s human. Try it, you’ll like it.

ASP Online announced its best of breed awards for Top Ten Web Support sites this past week. The award refers to companies that are doing more of the best–online knowledge management that actually works, easy access to user accounts, reliable order confirmation, stuff like that–as well as new approaches with social communities and media.
Some winners like Novell (I judged several of these but Novell was head and shoulders above not only the other entries, but my own experience of enterprise online support) have an amazingly deep offering of customer blogs, bulletin boards, wikis, all complemented by robust user account tools and info access.

Nice job, Novell! Anybody got other suggestions of companies that are getting it right?

You always hurt the one you love.  That seems to be the case with me.  For the most part, I love Apple.  I’m not a blind fanatic, I just think they do what they do better than just about anyone out there and I love the user experience–again and again and again.  I’m a loyal Apple consumer.

Ah, iTunes, I loved you so!

But, iTunes, iTunes, iTunes.  What a pain you are.  I’ve put off writing this post for a while because I just hate to face the fact that I’m so unhappy with iTunes.

The youngest member of my family, my sweet 12 year old god-daughter got an iTunes gift card for Christmas for her new iPod.  She’s a little teensy bit tentative around technology so she waited till after the holidays to give iTunes on her PC a whirl–she selected the songs she wanted early in January.

After Apple began offering DRM free music.  Which is marked with a + sign next to the purchase info.  You may not have noticed that.  It’s pretty innocuous, I certainly never noticed it.

Anyway, she clicked buy, and the song began to download, completed and then went into a phase called “Processing.”  It stayed in processing mode for several days, and would have stayed in processing mode for years I suspect had she not had the good sense to give it up.

When she first told me about this, I expected the issue was the PC vs. Mac thing or a virus or some such.  When I was visiting in March I sat down for an extended investigation of the situation.  After reading lots of comments in the forums, lots of forums all over including Apple, I figured out that this problem began after January 1, and involves this new + designation, the DRM free or added content songs.  It’s very very messed up. And as the forums indicate, there’s no answer forthcoming.

I contacted Apple and told them they took $25 from my 12 year old god-daughter and she got not one song in return–please explain. We got back a form letter saying in essence that they’d looked into the case and discerned that it’s too late to refund the money.  Nothing about the missing songs or anything else. Nothing.  Not one word.

I was really non-plussed. So I said, That’s it. No more buying songs from iTunes, I’m setting up an account for you at Amazon–all the songs you could want, cheaper, faster, better.  I mean, that’s a no-brainer if I ever heard one–there’s no barrier at all to switching.

So my god-daughter will happily head into her teen years with a much, much better buying experience with Amazon than Apple; as a share holder I couldn’t be happier about this.  But I was really bummed by Apple’s response, and their unwillingness to take responsibility for an issue that is clearly theirs.

I know Apple doesn’t make much off those tunes they sell, pennies, I’m sure.  But it’s a brand thing, right?  And iTunes is the bruised part of the Apple in my opinion.

The other day, after hearing a particularly lovely piece by Sounds from the Ground on SOMA FM, (I’m a tshirt wearing, cash paying fan of Soma!) I went right over to iTunes, searched and purchased the album. I couldn’t wait to put the whole album on my shuffle, it was the perfect rhythm for running and palpably improved my mood–I already love Sounds from the Ground, so I was tickled.

Everything went well, clicked the little “You are buying etc…” window and voila! Or not….

Alas, Apple decided this was the time to do one of its seemingly endless number of User Agreement pop-ups. No prob, I’ll just click thru, agree to whatever and be on my way.

But alas…the window that greeted me upon agreeing to their interruption?

Please try your purchase again.

So how bummed was I? After putting up with Apple’s interruption which I had no choice about, they lost everything–the album, the artist, everything! And I’m supposed to be so loyal that I go in and find it again? Nope. Sorry–they ruined the magic of the impulse moment. I was in the middle of work and it was far too easy to have second thoughts about spending the dough, interrupting more of my work, and the perceived value of the album itself.

Dear Apple: please, please figure out how to be less invasive about this. Figure out how to save the purchase information on my album so we both win. Okay? Okay.

I get these questions sometimes from Boomer bosses who are starting to feel a little twitchy about twitter and the likes. Reminds me of the generation-appropriate reference to Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man:

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

(For the Gen X, Y, and Z’ers out there: Bob Dylan was singing to the gray haired boss-man of his age. Deja Vu all over again.)

So this week the exec question from the Well-Established-Corp was along the lines of “I’m interested in This Topic but where do I start?” By topic, the exec meant: social media writ large, but even the name Social Media is a wee scary and just saying it may put one in the deep end without the toe-dipping, comfort gauging phase. I’m not kidding or poking fun here. Imagine the scene: you have a generation coming up that may have the nuts-and-bolts about running a business scattered about, but this whole ever-expanding universe of rapid info-sharing is as habitual and natural to them as watching cable news.

(That’s a whole nuther topic: the gen that has the “interwebs thingy” down to a fine art can learn from the tried and tested exec, and the exec needs to brave the cold dunk of diving in and abandoning usual comfort zones in favor of this new thing that will not–guaranteed: will not–go away.)

The truth is, the gray hair demographic is the fastest growing group on Facebook and other apps, even though they comprise a smaller percentage of the whole..by a lot. But still. The good news: this stuff is pretty easy. I mean, you’re not trying to learn how to build apps, you’re just trying to conceptually understand how it works, right? There are all kinds of ways you can use Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and other apps to your great advantage, and you should having a working understanding of these things. Oh yeah, and it’s fun. That helps.

My advice to the exec: take a bootcamp approach (Here are some good options if you want to get out of town for this, or contact me for more ideas). Learn it for yourself over a weekend or a day or two with some guidance from Knowledgeable Ones. Once you see how it works for you, you will be able to grok what your spiffy Marketing Team is trying to tell you, or your passionate Service Team, or your sensitive and sensible PR Team, or any other group within your company.

And of course, since I’m part of the fast growing Social Media Club here in Seattle (twitter handle: @smcseattle), I’m going to put in a plug for Social Media Club. It’s an international organization with tons of chapters and activities and talks given by recognized experts, both local and global. So see if there’s one near you, or again, contact me and I’ll help you figure it out.

Sure, there are plenty of nuances. Not everything that’s being touted right now is going to work, and corporate transparency of the kind Social Media brings to the fore is a challenging thing to manage–requires a lot of smarts and planning, don’t kid yourself.

And then there are the Others. Everyone’s getting pretty tired of the rapid rise of scams and security problems on Twitter, and dumb, poorly thought out marketing campaigns using Facebook and other apps. They threaten the party for everyone. But I promise you this: get a basic understanding of the Holy Trinity (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs) and you will be able to think through the Social Media strategy with your team without feeling like you’re in the wilderness. Trust me on this.

There’s a cool new tool out there that allows you, via a tag cloud, to see what your twitter gang is all about…that is, those who follow you. It draws from their bios and shows commonalities. Very interesting….
Just go to http://Twittersheep.com and try it out.

For the past few years, the discussion around how to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into enterprise KM has been hot and heavy.  Sides have been taken, lines drawn.  A lot of this came out of knee jerk reactions to a disruptive new technology–wikis, google-type search, folksonomies (is anyone using that term anymore?) etc.

Just read a good post (Organic Knowledge: Social networking technology) that reviews an article on how web 2.o is being incorporated with some facility into the manufacturing world (IDC Manufacturing Insights), and there are a couple of notes that seemed worth highlighting:

• Traditional KM efforts have been largely unsuccessful. The investments in KM that took place in the 1980s did not deliver the desired results and ended up costing more than anticipated. The reasons? “Intentions were good, but the approaches didn’t work very well,” Friedman says. For one, the applications were rigid in nature. For another, companies tended to approach them as corporate fiats (”You have to contribute or else!”), and they were often viewed as patronizing.

This problem (intentions good, approach wrong) is actually one of my favorites–though it shouldn’t be because it’s darn hard to solve. But Atkinson points to a key issue: rigidity.  And I would go so far as to say this: it’s not just the rigidity of the application or technology, though that’s a biggie.  It’s the rigidity of the team that usually takes on KM.  They tend to be highly organized, systematic thinkers who distrust organic knowledge sharing.  And with good reason: the big problems with organic knowledge sharing is consistency and manageability.  Consistency of information across all points, manageability of updates, measurements, etc.

His corporate fiat warning is a good one, too, and he expands on that well. I’ve been involved in roll-outs of wikis where there is a corporate fiat in place, and the health of the project suffers…to say the least.  If ever there was mismatch of intent and technology, it’s trying to mandate use of a wiki.

Corporate over-management of socially maintained KM has got to be viewed as a hugely counter-productive approach.  Atkinson wisely counsels a balanced approach between traditional KM centralization and organic knowledge growth:

• Traditional KM efforts have been largely unsuccessful. The investments in KM that took place in the 1980s did not deliver the desired results and ended up costing more than anticipated. The reasons? “Intentions were good, but the approaches didn’t work very well,” Friedman says. For one, the applications were rigid in nature. For another, companies tended to approach them as corporate fiats (”You have to contribute or else!”), and they were often viewed as patronizing.

Recently I’ve seen more comprehension around the idea that you select your super users (not a new idea, but a working knowledge of social networks has to be in place) and build out from there.  Any others seeing a more balanced approach to KM in their future?